Best known for her Gothic language handbooks, Karen Elizabeth Gordon here turns her extraordinary talents to fiction, and the result is as unconventional as her seductive grammar dramas. The Red Shoes consists of tatters of a half-dozen tales ("The Glass Shoe," "The Gingerbread Variations," "The Little Match Girl," "Don Juan Is a Woman," and the title story, among others), sewn together into a novel by two seamstresses. "Fabric, fabrication—such is the stuff of these lost chronicles come together here," Gordon writes in her introduction. "Swinging their hatboxes, swaying their hips, chapters with torn slips wander in on high heels and blistered feet." Looking back to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, but also casting sidelong glances at metafictional sugardaddies like Queneau, Nabokov, Cortazar, Gass, and Milorad Pavic, The Red Shoes is a Rabelaisian romp through the language of sensuality. "One of the most innovative and enchanting books of recent time. . . . [Gordon] has constructed a novel in dictionary form in which ordinary words reveal secret worlds that cling passionately to one another in a merry, whirling, lexical dance." (Thomas Christensen, San Francisco Chronicle) "Gordon ransacks fairy tales, movies, and popular romances to show how words' associations filter into the culture; in so doing, she holds a mirror to the stock language of everyday conversations and the non sequiturs and reflexive cliches that mar much prose." (Publishers Weekly 2-5-96) "[The Red Shoes] make[s] the mundane seem magical and transform[s] our earthbound language into a joy toy of infinite possibility. . . . The voice behind the dictionary is a wonderful creation—a nut in shining amour who comes at the world with both a resolutely girlish imagination and the lusty wisdom of the Wife of Bath. The most enjoyable aspect of The Red Shoes is its all-round lively writing." (Washington Post 6-30-96) "From the